David Allgood was executive vice-president and general counsel at RBC from 2000 until he retired earlier this year.Ryan Carter/The Globe and Mail
David Allgood, a well-known figure in the legal profession who spent the last decade-and-a-half as the top lawyer at Royal Bank of Canada, is joining Dentons Canada LLP as counsel.
Mr. Allgood was executive vice-president and general counsel at RBC from 2000 until he retired earlier this year. He had joined the bank in 1998, after leaving his post as a partner at Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, where he had worked as a tax lawyer since 1976.
Dentons, which announced his appointment on Monday, says Mr. Allgood will be working with both the firm's clients and internal teams across Canada and around the world.
In a recent interview with Canadian Lawyer magazine, Mr. Allgood said his prime career highlight was overseeing RBC's successful response to the litigation that followed the 2001 collapse of U.S.-based Enron Corp. in a massive accounting scandal. In 2009, allegations against RBC and Toronto-Dominion Bank in a U.S. shareholder lawsuit over Enron, one of the most notorious corporate frauds in U.S. history, were dropped. Several other major banks, including Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, paid billions of dollars in settlements.
From 2013 to 2014, he served as the first Canadian board chairman of the influential U.S.-based Association of Corporate Counsel, an organization with which he has long been involved. The ACC has been outspoken about the need to change the way law firms bill, calling for lower costs and new more efficient ways to charge clients to replace the profession's reliance on the billable hour.
"David's experience in leading the drive for change in the legal profession is closely aligned with Dentons' focus on innovation and challenging the status quo, to meet our clients' needs," Elliott Portnoy, Dentons' global chief executive officer, said in a statement.
Mr. Allgood joins the firm June 15. Dentons was created when Canadian firm Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP merged with two international firms in 2013. Earlier this year, Dentons announced a merger with China's Dacheng Law Offices, and another with with U.S.-based McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP, moves that have created the largest law firm by head count in the world, with about 7,000 lawyers and offices in 50 countries.
Jeff Gray